DESCRIPTION: The "Upper Midwest Long-Term Care Quality Summit" sponsored by the National Institute of Health Policy, University of St. Thomas (MN), is a collaborative effort to move quality improvement to a new level: beyond individual, internal nursing home transformation to a community-wide embrace of high-quality long-term care. To date quality improvement has been an essential internal management step, but an external environment is needed that will tolerate and support necessary changes. The current environment is shaped by payment and regulatory policies, which may run directly counter to quality improvement strategies, or at least create barriers to their implementation. By bringing all relevant stakeholders to the table, the conference will identify common ground and create new partnerships. The February 2006 conference is designed to meet two AHRQ conference approaches: formulate a research agenda through conference discussion that will reaffirm and contribute new thinking for improvement of a community-wide approach to nursing home and long term care quality; and develop a research infrastructure to test the long term quality ideals put forth by the participants. One or more innovative partnerships among a variety of constituencies in Minnesota and Wisconsin - providers, payers, regulators, consumer advocates - will collaborate to create the necessary infrastructure to appropriately plan and implement a major demonstration project(s). Effort to address residence-level issues, such as quality of life and satisfaction have been championed, but have fallen short on creating truly effective models that demonstrate the positive impact of a collaborative, community-wide approach to long term care quality. A final policy paper to be completed at the conclusion of the conference will be presented to the National Commission for Quality Long-term Care. [unreadable] [unreadable] The anticipated number of participants will be 100-120, on an invitation basis, including all members of the National Commission for Quality Long-term Care, members of organizations with an interest in quality improvement in nursing homes as well as providers, regulators, payers, consumers, legislators, and academics. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]